Newhouse Slams BLM Nominee for “Eco-terrorism”

Congressman Dan Newhouse recently penned a letter to Washington Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell asking them to pull their support for Director of the Bureau of Land Management nominee Tracy Stone-Manning.

After a very contentious meeting, Stone-Manning's nomination was advanced out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Thursday and will soon face a full Senate vote.

In the letter, Newhouse calls Stone-Manning an "extreme eco-terrorist" who "lied to the press, the Montana state legislature, and the United States Senate about her involvement in a 1989 tree spiking incident in Idaho's Clearwater National Forest."

The 1989 incident in question happened when a group of eco-saboteurs drove 500 pounds of metal spikes into some old-growth trees. Stone-Manning, a graduate student at the University of Montana - Missoula at the time, rented a typewriter as a way to remain anonymous and retyped a letter on behalf of one of the activists to the U.S. Forest Service. She then mailed the letter.

Stone-Manning claims the letter was written as a way to warn the authorities of the tree spikes. She would later testify against two of the eco-terrorists in federal court in exchange for immunity.